Ben: Shit, you actually weren't lying about INSOMNIA.
Ben: Remind me what happens in
that book? Some old dude can't sleep for the first half, which made for
an actually decent story, and then in the second half he and his
withered girlfriend turn into kids to fight aliens, akin to geriatric
Animorphs?
Ben: Hahaha, you weren't lying about the not-canon part either. What was even the point of this exchange?
Ben: I can't believe motherfucking Susannah is still alive.
Ben: I'm preparing a strongly-worded letter to Stephen King to berate him for this oversight.
Ben: I was really, really hoping he would bring the black lady CEO with him and just forget Susannah ever existed.
Ben: Reading a subchapter
wherein Stephen King (the character) reflects upon writing the book's
previous subchapter and Stephen King (the author) tries to defuse any of
his Constant Readers who are mad at him for killing Jake by professing
that Stephen King (both of them) had no say in the matter. This isn't
HOUSE OF LEAVES, you fuck!
Ben: I don't want to read this scene where Roland fucks an old lady.
Me: Does this happen in every book or something?
Ben: I don't think this has happened since the fifth book.
Ben: And that lady was only sorta old.
Ben: OOOHHHHH SHIIIIIIIT.
Me: The time has come.
Ben: Two hundred pages into this book and I still have no idea what the kid from THE TALISMAN has to do with any of this.
Me: I don't think he shows up again.
Ben: If the epilogue of BLACK HOUSE has nothing to do with this series at all then I'm going to kick Stevie King in the nuts.
Me: What happened in the epilogue of Black House?
Ben: The kid from THE TALISMAN
who is now the adult who was formerly the kid from THE TALISMAN gets
assassinated and he flips over to the lovely land where his barren
fuckfriend is like yo I can heal you but you'll never be strong enough
to return to your own land and then something something you still have a
role to play in saving the world from the bulldozer king something
something allusions to gunslingers and the tower blah blah blah.
Ben: And it's so obvious that
he's going to show up in the story like Callahan did but if you're
telling me he's not then wtf is this hack author even smoking.
Me: I think those were in the box because Black House talks about the Bulldozer King a lot.
Me: Tbh I made this reading list 25 years ago and remember nothing about these books.
Me: Has anything exciting happened yet?
Ben: Callahan got eaten by vampires, uh, Jake escaped a Warner Brothers cartoon dinosaur.
Ben: Susannah did something, but nobody cares because she's the worst character.
Ben: Baby Mordred is silly.
Ben: Rooting for baby Mordred to eat Stephen King irl.
Me: Did the Walken Dude come back yet?
Ben: The Man In Black, Whom The Gunslinger Hath Followed Across The Desert? Nah.
Me: Played by Matthew McDonald.
Ben: Matthew Broderick.
Ben: The entire cast is a reunion of FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF.
Ben: The principal is the bulldozer king.
Me: Good casting given the Kirk plot in Black House.
Ben: Too soon.
Ben: Oh here's R.F. Stine right now.
Me: What chapter are you on?
Ben: CHAPTER III: THE SHINING WIR; THE DARK TOWER: BOOK SEVEN: THE DARTOWER.
Ben: THE THRILLINGLY CLIMACTIC EIGHTH BOOK IN THE EPIC 20-BOOK SEPTOLOGY.
Me: WHAT HAVE I BECOME MY SWEETEST FRIEND
Ben: I did like how the opening quotes were Robert Browning and Trent Reznor.
Me: Both college dropouts.
Ben: I started reading the poem in the beginning and was like wtf there's no way Stephen King wrote this, it's actually good.
Me: Hahaha.
Ben: Ka is a wheel.
Me: Time is a flat circle.
Ben: It's like he's being typecast but I'm not sure what his type is.
Ben: Ok, they just name-dropped
the town from BLACK HOUSE so if that's the only reference to BLACK
HOUSE in this book then I'm going to punt Stephen King into
geosynchronous orbit.
Me: Where is Randall Munroe?
Ben: Randall appears to be in a bit of a pickle.
Ben: Foreshadowing that
someone's going to die, trying to guess who it is. Can't be Jake,
because he has to be the last to die. Can't be Eddie, because then
nobody would bother carrying Susannah. And Susannah is less important to
the story than Oy, so it's gotta be her.
Ben: Calling it now that spiderbabby eats her.
Me: Has anyone died yet?
Ben: No I went to go make pizza.
Me: Email me if you want a pizza roll.
Ben: Did you watch the redlettermedia review of A TRANSFORMER IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT?
Ben: RIP Eddie, if only you had died sooner so we could have left Susannah behind six books ago.
Me: Are you crying?
Ben: Tears of blood from my great crimson eye.
Me: Did you cry when Stephen
King killed off his most prolific villain in a dramatically extraneous
scene with no narrative payoff to seven books of buildup?
Ben: You fool, it's BECAUSE
Walter o'Flagg died pointlessly that Eddie had to die pointlessly.
Didn't you read the line about ka coming into balance?
Me: I don't think he's dead I THINK HE CAN NEVER DIE.
Ben: Didn't he survive an atomic bomb or something?
Ben: Getting your face eaten by a spider seems like it would be relatively easy to recover from in comparison.
Me: Didn't he used to be an incarnation of Nyarlathotep instead of some guy that got ass-raped by a homeless person?
Ben: Eager for Stephen King to explore that plot thread further in the inevitable prequel.
Me: THE DARTOWER 0: THE DICK THROUGH THE ASSHOLE
Ben: I ROSE IN HIS KEYHOLE
Me: IN THE COURT OF THE SODOMY KING
Ben: WIZARD AND ASS
Me: Somebody send in the Safety Ghosts.
Ben: Hahaha, what the fuck even did we do?
Ben: All I remember is that I was Cornelius.
Ben: Or was Will Cornelius?
Me: Will was Cornelius Cannerary.
Me: Reported rapes dropped by 80%.
Ben: Oh right, we stormed the bathroom and harassed Brandon.
Ben: Mission accomplished.
Me: WORST ROOMMATES EVER GOD.
Ben: Do you think he cherishes those days? Thinks of them sweetly and longingly in his moments of quiet contemplation?
Ben: I wonder if Roland successfully manages to convince Stephen King to write the book I'm currently reading.
Ben: Plot twist: King gets flattened by a truck, but they convince K.A. Applegate to ghostwrite the last three books.
Me: The taheen are Animorphs that got trapped while demorphing.
Me: Wait what happened to that weasel guy who couldn't successfully masturbate?
Ben: He got shot off-screen.
Me: Best character all series.
Ben: Looking forward to the
scene where Roland tells Stephen King to not kill Eddie, and also to
just stop giving a fuck for narrative and climax and just type AND THEY
WON; THE END, and also bring Susan back and make her titties bigger than
ever.
Me: Stephen King just controls the fire, he can't create it.
Ben: It was always burning, since the world's been turning.
Ben: I am 500 pages into this book, how can that possibly be only halfway?
Me: Did they save the Tower yet?
Ben: No.
Ben: Fucking spoilers.
Me: Didn't they save the old man from Hearts in Atlantis who was knocking the Tower down by thinking at it really hard?
Ben: Yeah.
Ben: But Ronald's friend from Mejisco is going to die from a foot infection, just nobody knows that yet.
Me: Shlomo the magic pianist.
Ben: I've just seen the entry
entitled "Headcanon" on our popular blog and I'm sad to report that I do
recall the part of this book where Roland, when casually faced with the
collected bibliography of Stephen King, orders none of his ka-tet to
read them; wishing I had the same sense of foresight.
Me: Are you reading the whole tome in one day?
Ben: I don't have it in me, sai.
Me: What is your comp-level critical analysis of the story so far?
Ben: At least they fucking did something, unlike in the last book.
Ben: Like, they had a problem,
they came up with a solution, they carried it out. That's a story. There
were no stories in SONG OF SUSANNAH.
Ben: Other than one's own mental image of Stephen King, pen in one hand, lubricated shaft in the other, writing his own dialogue.
Ben: I feel absolutely sure
that the entirety of the sixth book could be replaced by an index card
reading "THEY MET STEPHEN KING IN 1970 AND GOT MACGUFFIN THAT PROTECTS
ANOTHER MACGUFFIN" and nothing of value would be lost.
Me: Didn't Jake and Roland have to rekill a bunch of minor characters they already killed in the second book?
Ben: Not that I recall, Jake
and Roland had no time together because they went todash immediately
after Susannah who escaped at the end of the fifth book.
Me: Fuck I don't remember anything from that book then except Jake and Callahan bought a pet turtle.
Ben: No, they found a carved turtle, and technically I think it was first alluded to in the fifth book anyway.
Me: It was the baby of a big turtle.
Ben: The sixth book of this
series is just Stephen King saying to himself, fuck, didn't I want there
to be seven books in this series? Better bullshit for six hundred pages
having the characters do things of no consequence.
Ben: THE STAND was a more productive read.
Ben: And that's saying something.
Me: Was Callahan worth the wait for his return from that bus ride?
Ben: At least Callahan was a nifty throwback to King's days as a starving artist.
Ben: You aren't allowed to see the movie until I'm there in the theater with you.
Ben: It will be the culmination of this aeons-old journey.
Me: Make sure to schedule enough time to watch every Linkara video ever made.
Ben: I'll make sure to schedule
enough time to first stop by the gun counter at Wal-Mart for a fresh
new firearm (don't forget the three day waiting period!), plus a single
bullet.
Author: Joe Schreiber
Medium: Novel
Publication Date: December 2010
Timeline Placement: 3,645 BBY
I almost stopped reading this book on page 16, when I got to this passage at the end of the second chapter:
Opening his eyes again, he looked at the cracked wall. It had been strong, but now it was damaged, its value weakened in some fundamental way by what had been inflicted on it.
I am that wall.
It’s always a good sign when a book comes with its own built-in SparkNotes, just in case you find its heavy-handed symbolism too obscure. It’s good to show contempt for your audience.
Red Harvest is a zombie book, and a prequel to the 2009 zombie book Death Troopers, which I haven’t read and am now dreading. The story involves a zombie plague that breaks out on an ice planet full of faceless bad guys when an evil faction at war with the Republic attempts to harness the knowledge of an ancient Sith Lord 3,000-some years before the movies. If this plot sounds familiar, it’s because it is. A lot of indistinguishable characters are introduced, do nothing, and die. Eventually the main girl escapes due to no agency or capability of her own, and the book ends. That’s the whole plot.
Let’s take a look at our cast of characters, if you can call them that. The dramatis personae lists fifteen named characters, thirteen of which are human and thirteen of which are male. It’s like an argument for affirmative action right there on the first page.
Hestizo Trace, nicknamed “Zo” because even the author realized what a stupid name “Hestizo” is, is the main character of Red Harvest, as far as I can tell. A twenty-five-year-old member of the Jedi Agricultural Corps, she has a natural affinity for plantlife and psychic communication with shrubbery. As established in various other sources, the AgriCorps is basically where you get sent when you’re inducted into the Jedi Order as a child but your Force powers don’t develop enough for you to become a Knight. You don’t get a lightsaber, but you do get to spend your life telepathically encouraging plants to grow. Yayyyy. I don’t think this fact is ever mentioned in the book, however; Zo is consistently referred to as a Jedi, but she doesn’t have a lightsaber and is Force-incompetent to the point of being regular-incompetent.
Zo has a special bond with a Murakami orchid, an especially Force-sensitive flower that is the final ingredient the evil Darth Scabrous needs to complete his immortality potion. He sends a Whiphid bounty hunter named Tulkh to steal the orchid, but because Zo is foolish enough to tell him that the flower, once removed from its incubator, can’t survive outside her presence, she ends up kidnapped and hauled off to the frozen wasteland of Odacer-Faustin, home of Sith High and brazenly pointless filler plots.
 |
| Oh my God, this is so much better. |
Seven of the fifteen characters in the dramatis personae are teenage students at Sith High, and one is a teacher. That’s over half the cast, and you could excise literally all of their point-of-view chapters without affecting the plot in any way. One after another, they’re introduced, get no character development, and then are brutally killed off for no narrative reason. Mnah Ra’at, Hartwig, and Maggs are virtually indistinguishable, and Jura Ostrogoth is only discernible from them because of this incongruous anecdote about how he almost got gay-raped by another student his first day at the school. Kindra is the girl and lives the longest by betraying her classmates and refusing to take her clothes off when they ask her to, but she eventually gets torn apart by zombies anyway. Sith Professor Xat Hracken has like two lines of dialogue and then turns into a zombie. None of these characters ever interacts with or is even aware of the existence of Hestizo Trace or anyone involved with her section of the plot, which is really just “the plot.”
Zo’s brother, Jedi Knight Spanish-for-Red Trace, senses her abduction through the Force. Rather than alert his superiors that his sister has been kidnapped and going after her with some Jedi backup, he sends this message to her abductor through the Force, even though he has no reason to believe that this person is a Force-sensitive who would even be able to receive it: Listen to me. I don’t know who you are, but I am in possession of a very special set of skills. If you bring my sister back right now, unharmed, then I’ll let you go. But if you don’t, I promise you, I will track you down. I will find you. And I will make you pay.
This is the second point where I almost stopped reading the book. Not that Liam Neeson’s Taken isn’t a time-tested classic in the cinematic canon whose influence will be immediately evident to anyone reading this book more than two years after it came out, but why is that in here?
Then later there’s a Fahrenheit 451 reference: chapter 32 begins with the line “It was a pleasure to burn.” The author also revealed that “the first draft of the novel contained a character named Middish Sunblade, modeled after Holden Caulfield, but Sunblade was removed from the rewrite because he was whiny and nobody could stand him.” It’s like this book was written by a high school student doing an assignment for a creative writing class, and he just threw a bunch of references and allusions to books he’d read for other classes and what was on TV at the time into his zombie splatterbook without stopping to consider if they made any sense at all or were in any way appropriate for the subject matter he was writing about.
Anyway, Trace appears in like three scenes after that, then the zombified Darth Scabrous kills him with a sword.
 |
| A Whiphid. You have to be a badass to leave the house in that dopey costume. |
Tulkh, the Whiphid bounty hunter, and Dail’Liss, the Sith librarian, are the only two non-human characters in the dramatis personae and also the only two who come at all close to being interesting to read about. Tulkh carries a spear and his ship has a trophy room full of bones, just like the Predator in Predator 2, and he later teams up with the female character he was previously antagonizing to face a greater threat, just like the Predator in Alien vs. Predator. Unlike the Predator, however, he has no reason to do this, as after he was paid for delivering Zo to Scabrous he could have just left the planet. For some reason, though, despite showing no remorse for kidnapping her and impaling her coworker, Tulkh sticks around to help Zo, and ultimately rescues her at the end of the book before nobly allowing himself to be flushed into space to save her from the zombie contamination within him. This would be an acceptable character arc if anyone had bothered to actually write it.
Dail’Liss is a thousand-year-old Neti, a tree-like alien who at a certain point in its life cycle becomes even more tree-like, sinking its roots into the ground and becoming immobile. The book clearly states that Dail’Liss is rooted in place and can’t leave his library, but he’s somehow still able move his trunk through the walls and cracks of the building by sliding along his branches or something, which makes me wonder if the author has ever seen a tree before. Despite being a Sith, Dail’Liss seems like a pretty chill dude. He just wants to sit in his library and read books, so naturally he gets turned into an evil zombie tree.
The third almost-interesting character is Darth Scabrous’s HK-model assassin droid, who gets neither a name nor a mention in the dramatis personae, but is more important than about two thirds of the characters who do. The droid teams up with Tulkh to eviscerate zombies with giant guns, then later sacrifices himself for no reason to take out the Sith’s antiaircraft batteries and allow his friends (?) to escape.
The book ends with two survivors, Hestizo Trace and a mechanic named Pergus Frode, escaping from Odacer-Faustin aboard Tulkh’s ship. Zo returns to the AgriCorps, but decides that instead of getting back into botany right away she wants to first visit the Jedi Temple on Coruscant to continue her training, even though Darth Malgus razed the Jedi Temple to the ground in the previous book. That’s going to be a pretty short trip, Zo.
 |
| But I, although slighted because I was not big, fought, trees, in your array on the field of Goddeu Brig. |
Stylistically, the book’s prose is very simple and straightforward, with the occasional SAT word like “threnody” or “rectilinear” thrown in for flavor. That’s not to say it descends to the bland juvenility of something like Revan; Schreiber’s writing style is uninspiring but intellectually inoffensive, and I was able to breeze through the book in a handful of sittings over about three days. There is a ton of gore and excessive violence, lengthy and repetitive descriptions of people’s guts hanging out and people’s faces sloughing off, which isn’t typically what I would read a Star Wars book for, but it would be fine if there was anything to it besides graphicness for the sake of graphicness.
This is ostensibly a horror novel, but it’s never scary. Even the unremitting violence isn’t that fun; there are hardly any cool zombie kills, with the exception of Tulkh and the HK droid briefly teaming up at the very end and a non sequitur scene in which Zo, whose greatest talent is talking to plants, uses the Force to slow down time enough to grab an arrow in mid-flight and use it to kill ten zombies in about two seconds. This is the only cool or interesting thing she does in the entire book, until near the end when she uses the Force to somehow phase through the bonds tying her to a sacrificial altar.
This book isn’t insultingly, embarrassingly bad like Revan, but Revan failed both as its own story and as the follow-up to a much better story; Red Harvest is just a whole lot of nothing, so that’s what I’m giving it.
0/5 Death Stars.
So I read this comic forever ago and pretty much forgot what happened in it. Well I remember it sucks.
Originally published as a series of online web strips that were later compiled into three comic issues that were later collected in a transparently skinny trade paperback, the story takes place concurrently with Deceived, and even features a few of the same characters. Because it was one of the earliest tie-ins to Star Wars: The Old Republic, however, predating the release of the game by nearly a year, almost none of those characters’ personalities match how they’re depicted in the book we just read.
For example, Darth Malgus’s boss, Darth Angry, shows up as one of the main antagonists. Deceived portrayed him as lackadaisical bureaucrat, a career politician more interested in processing paperwork and making racist jokes among his peers than plumbing the depths of the dark side. Here he’s a vitriolic hothead who runs around shouting a lot and trying to murder everyone. He’s ideologically opposed to making peace with the Republic, whereas in the book he couldn’t seem to care less; his characterization here is more akin to how Malgus was portrayed in Deceived.
His rival, Darth Bareass, had only a very small cameo appearance in Deceived, but in his expanded role here he’s characterized closer to how Darth Angry was in the book: even-tempered, calculating, politically shrewd. Not having played the MMO that both of these works are based on, I don’t know which version of these characters is more faithful to their presentation in the game.
One thing that I’m guessing was changed between this promotional comic and TOR‘s release was Satele Shan. A descendant of Bastila Shan and Revan, Satele also put in an unmemorable cameo in Deceived. Before that, we saw her as a young girl in the cinematic trailers Return and Hope. It’s been 28 years since Return; according to the birthdate Wookieepedia has for her, that should make Satele about 46 at the time of Threat of Peace. The guy who wrote this comic apparently didn’t know that, though, despite the back cover saying he was also a writer for the MMO.
Despite being a middle-aged adult, Satele is still a flighty apprentice prone to being chastised by her Jedi Master, secret villainess Dar’Nala. She also develops an adolescent flirtation with Republic clone trooper Harron Tavus. Apparently early information about the MMO placed it thirty years after the Treaty of Coruscant, but in the finalized timeline there’s only a ten-year gap. The resulting discrepancy in Satele’s characterization is pretty funny.
Another thing not worth mentioning is that this comic is the first and only appearance of Zym, the Grand Master of the Jedi Order, who was mentioned in Deceived but didn’t appear. The title “Grand Master” was, as far as I can tell after consulting Wookieepedia’s virtually useless method of source citation, created by Sean Stewart in his excellent one-and-done Star Wars novel, Yoda: Dark Rendezvous. At the time it was just an honorific unique to Yoda, signifying his leadership of the Jedi, his unsurpassed wisdom, his centuries of Jedi training, and his real-world popularity. Later books extended the title to Luke Skywalker as well, which was fine, because if there are two characters worthy of representing the pinnacle of Jedi-ness, they’re Yoda and Luke.
So naturally it wasn’t long before the EU ruined this title the same way it ruined the Darth name, handing it out like Cracker Jack prizes to unremarkable scrubs in an attempt to make them seem interesting without having to actually write anything interesting about them, because writing is hard. Case in point, Grand Master Zym shows up, does nothing, and dies like a bitch. Other Grand Masters include Satele Shan, Nomi Sunrider, two characters from reference articles who never appeared in an actual story, and this elf/cat lady. What great and memorable characters, truly worthy of standing in the pop culture pantheon right next to Luke Skywalker and Yoda. Or maybe just a tiny, tiny bit below them.
Also there’s a non sequitur subplot about a bounty hunter who wears Mandalorian armor but isn’t Mandalorian trying to kill a bad Wookiee.
Plot is nonsensical, characters are nonexistent, art is possibly the worst we’ve seen so far. I feel like I say that every time we cover a new comic, but every time it feels like it’s true.
Skip this one, it stinks. 1/5 Death Stars.
The earliest of these TOR trailers is also the shortest. Darth Malgus, who now wears a respirator mask because of how his face got exploded in the last video, walks into the Jedi Temple on Coruscant and kills a lot of Jedi, assisted by the latest of the EU’s many pretty redheaded ladies, Mandalorian warrior Shae Vizla. A ship full of more Sith crashes through the wall and everybody fights with lightsabers. Malgus kills the head Jedi then walks away from the temple like a badass, revealing that the rest of the planet is also under attack. THE END!
Once again there’s not enough content here to give a fair rating, but luckily for us, the critical response to this trailer was so positive someone decided, hey, let’s turn this three-minute videogame trailer into a full-length novel. What fun.
2/5 Death Stars or something.
The author wishes to thank Ann Przewozny for help obtaining the subject of this review.
Deceived tells the story of smuggler Zeerid “Z-Man” Korr and Jedi Knight Aryn Leneer, and how they learn to overcome their own internal demons and find redemption for all their bad decision-making. Also Darth Malgus is in there somewhere.
We begin with a retelling of the events of the Deceived trailer. Well, actually we begin with an introduction to the Z-Man as a former Republic soldier and single father in debt up to his eyeballs to the galactic crime syndicate The Exchange, and the unsavory things he must do to repay his debts and support his double-amputee daughter. But elsewhere, in the part of the story you bought the book for, Darth Malgus leads the Sith attack on the Jedi Temple. As in the trailer, he’s accompanied by a gun-slinging female Twi’lek, but here we learn that her name is Eleena Daru and she is Malgus’s girlfriend. Malgus meets the temple’s head Jedi Master, Ven Zallow, in single combat. For some reason the book’s dramatis personae says that Zallow’s species is unknown even though he’s clearly human. This doesn’t help him, however, as Malgus runs him through and then blows up the Jedi Temple with several bombs.
Meanwhile, peace negotiations have begun on Alderaan, called by the Sith to lull the Republic into a false sense of security while the Empire strikes at Coruscant. Aryn Leneer, a Jedi Knight from the Republic delegation and the former Padawan of Master Zallow, is gifted with the talent of unusually strong Force empathy; that is, she is highly attuned to the intentions and emotional states of others. She and her friend, fellow Jedi Syo Bakarn (who according to Wookieepedia is apparently one of the Children of the Emperor, the Sith sleeper agents we learned about back in Blood of the Empire, which would probably be a cool cameo for anyone who’s played the game this book is based on), speculate on the Sith’s motives for suing for peace, when Aryn suddenly feels Ven Zallow’s death through the Force.
 |
| “Leneer was gifted in the use of Force empathy, which earned her the title of ‘Force Empath.'” — Wookieepedia |
Realizing that the Republic has been betrayed, Aryn attacks two of the Sith present at the peace talks, but is reined in by Master Dar’Nala, the Jedi’s representative at the conference. Also Satele Shan is there too. Hey remember Satele Shan from those two trailers we watched before? And then nothing else? Darth Baras, the Sith representative, comes out and is all like “Yeah we took over Coruscant, now you jerks have to do whatever we say or else we’ll genocide the Republic capital! Now let’s go back inside and continue discussing the terms of our peace treaty.” All the Jedi are like “Huuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh?”
Due to her heightened psychic empathy, Aryn Leneer experienced first hand Master Zallow’s sense of shame and failure, as well as the pain of having a lightsaber blade stuck through his chest. Unable to accept the Jedi’s decision to continue negotiating with the Sith, she vows to avenge her Master’s death and abandons her Jedi robes on the floor outside her starfighter. The problem she faces is getting to Coruscant through the Sith blockade. Fortunately for her (and for us, because who doesn’t want to spend more time reading about Z-Man’s gambling addiction and legless daughter?), she has an old friend who might be able to help her.
It turns out that Zeerid Korr and Aryn Leneer fought the Sith together back when Zeerid was in the Republic military, which he left when his wife was killed and his daughter lost her legs in a car accident. The Great War’s been going strong for 28 years at this point, making it the longest single galactic conflict in Star Wars EU history, so I guess that checks out. Zeerid feels like his life is on a treadmill. No matter how many smuggling jobs he does for The Exchange, he’s so deep in debt due to his daughter’s medical bills, his gambling, and the cost of his ship, Fatman, he’ll never be able to pay it off and buy his daughter, Arra, prosthetic legs or even a hoverchair.
So when his handler offers him the opportunity to wipe away all of his debt with one final job, Zeerid jumps at the chance. All he has to do is deliver a shipment of engspice, an addictive drug that alters the user’s brain chemistry so they become dependent on only that one specific brand of spice, to Imperial-occupied Coruscant without getting blown up by the Sith blockade. Zeerid objects because smuggling illegal weapons never hurt anyone but drug-running is just plain wrong. But The Exchange is like “Do it or we’ll kill you” and Zeerid goes “Okay.”
Zeerid returns home to the planet Vulta to visit his daughter and sister-in-law, taking care to ensure he’s not being followed because The Exchange doesn’t know he has a family. However, he’s being followed. Vrath Xizor, a human formerly employed as a sniper in the Sith military and no relation to that other Xizor you may have heard of, squeezes out a tube of toothpaste containing microscopic tracker droids on the ground in front of Zeerid, and once Zeerid walks through it Vrath can follow him anywhere, and also somehow differentiate between the trackers adhered to Zeerid and those adhered to the millions of other people who stepped in the same spot. You’d think there’d be a simpler way of doing this.
But apparently not, because it works. After Zeerid, Aryn, and Malgus, who we’ll get back to in a moment, Vrath is our fourth major point-of-view character, which is weird because his role in the plot is so secondary to the other characters. Yet we keep coming back to him. There are multiple points when you expect him to die because his usefulness to the story is over, but he sticks around to the end of the book, popping up every so often to remind us that he’s still alive until Zeerid unceremoniously flushes him out an airlock at the end (spoiler alert). An employee of the Hutt cartels hired to disrupt The Exchange’s engspice shipment, Vrath immediately discovers Zeerid’s secret family very early in the book, but any tension this might have created is immediately deflated when Vrath’s internal monologue explains that he would never use a man’s family against him. Whoo boy, now I’m really on the edge of my seat.
Aryn shows up at Zeerid’s house and is like “Hey remember me from a long time ago? Can you help me get onto Coruscant? I didn’t even know you were alive until I showed up here so I had no idea that you’ve become the go-to smuggler for the largest criminal organization in the galaxy, but I thought you might be able to help anyway.” Zeerid is like, “What a coincidence, I’m headed there right now. Let’s go! Also I’m making it very clear that I want to fuck you.” He doesn’t really say that last part though. Vrath and his goons try to intercept them at the airport but after a brief firefight Zeerid and Aryn escape aboard Fatman. Cursing his luck, Vrath also takes off for Coruscant, hoping to beat them there so he can warn the Sith.
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| The Z-Man himself, Channing Tatum. |
Back on Coruscant, what Darth Malgus thought was going to be a pretty good day has just been getting worse and worse. First his girlfriend was injured in the attack, so he had her sent to the Sith medical transport. Then, after several hours spent jerking off over the ruins of the Jedi Temple, he started wondering why the Sith hadn’t sent down any bombers to level the rest of the planet, only to turn his phone back on to discover several missed calls and a voicemail from his boss, Darth Angral, telling him that the peace talks are back on and Coruscant’s not going to be destroyed after all. Now he has to sit through an awkward performance review with Darth Angral and Darth Adraas, who he outranks but is clearly the boss’s favorite.
Darth Malgus is probably the reason most people bought this book, and though he’s not the central protagonist, he’s still in it enough and interesting enough to justify that purchase. Of all the Sith in the book, Malgus is most like what you’d expect the Sith to be. He’s angry, violent, destructive, full of hate, and hideously deformed. The rest of the Sith Empire seems to be full of bureaucrats ready to compromise the purity of their dark power to curry political favor. This creates an interesting contrast as we watch what we expect the Sith to be butt up against what the Sith have now become. Malgus is more than just a simple proto-Sith, however. His faith in the dark side is almost a religious conviction, a fundamentalist certainty that his knowledge of the Force is pure and the Jedi’s is adulterated. Malgus believes that the point of life is conflict, because conflict refines one’s understanding of the Force, and those who don’t survive clearly misunderstood it. This is why, although he respects the Jedi, he believes they must be eradicated. When he was very young, he had a vision of Coruscant and the Republic burning at his feet; since then, he has believed that it is his destiny to destroy them, and today was supposed to see that destiny realized.
Instead he’s been called to the Supreme Chancellor’s office in the Senate building, where Darth Angral has set up shop and is drinking wine with Darth Adraas. They make fun of him for having a girlfriend and tell him that they had her sent to a Republic hospital on the planet instead of getting treatment on the Sith medical ship. Despite how little sense it makes for a government founded by aliens and led by an alien, the Sith Empire of the TOR era is a blatant expy of Palpatine’s Galactic Empire, right down to the Star Destroyers, stormtroopers, brilliant reclusive Emperor on a quest for immortality, and humanocentric xenophobia. So because the Sith are all racist, they talk shit about Malgus for dating a Twi’lek and refuse to treat her at their own facility.
“What is this? What is happening here?” Malgus demands of Darth Angral, as out of his depth in state politics as Ned Stark. Angral feigns confusion and Adraas calls Eleena Malgus’s “mongrel harlot slave” and chides Malgus for his feelings for her. Malgus whips out his lightsaber and they exchange a few blows before Darth Angry tells them to knock it off. Malgus goes to find his girlfriend at the hospital, stewing in disappointment over how what was supposed to be the greatest day of his life has been turned into nothing but political currency for the Sith Emperor to wield during the peace negotiations.
Malgus arrives at the hospital only to find it surrounded by Black Lives Matter protesters rioting over the Sith invasion. For some reason they decide it’s a good idea to start throwing shit at a malignant sorcerer, so Malgus casts Force Wave and blasts everyone flying across the parking lot. He finds Eleena in the hospital and is horrified by the feeling of relief that washes over him upon seeing that she’s all right. “Veradun!” Eleena cries out in happiness, using Malgus’s real name in front of a bunch of peasants. He chokes her out for her transgression and promises that if she ever calls him that in public again he will murder her. I just love a good Star Wars romance.
Meanwhile Xizor makes contact with the Sith blockade and warns them about Fatman, so when Zeerid and Aryn come out of hyperspace they are barely able to make it into Coruscant’s atmosphere before being blown away. Apparently it’s not a big deal having your starship shot out from under you though because Aryn just casts Force Parachute and brings them both in for a safe landing on the ground hundreds of miles below using nothing but space magic. I guess Palpatine and Mace Windu just didn’t have enough time to recharge their Force meter.
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| Everything is perfectly fine. |
Xizor is like, “Where’s my money, honey?” Malgus agrees to pay him 100 bricks of gold-pressed latinum, but it will be temporarily useless to him because blockade protocol is to prevent any ships from leaving the area for the duration of the peace accords. Xizor realizes with a dawning dread that he will have to wait on the planet with everyone else. How evilly inconvenient!
With his cargo destroyed, Z-Man is unable to complete his mission, pay off his debts, and save his family, but he still wants to bone Aryn so he promises to help her get revenge for her dead master, a goal at least equally as virtuous as delivering mind-altering addictive drugs to an unsuspecting populace.
Zeerid and Aryn coincidentally run into Master Zallow’s orphaned astromech droid, T7-O1, a companion character for players of the Jedi Knight character class in The Old Republic. The droid leads them through a secret tunnel to the subterranean ruins of the Jedi Temple, where Aryn recovers a security recording of the Sith attack and learns the identity of her master’s killer. She also notices how protective Malgus is of the Twi’lek woman accompanying him, which sets the wheels in her head turning toward revenge.
Zeerid and Aryn track the Twi’lek to a Sith-controlled spaceport. Despite his promise to help her, Zeerid gets bored and decides to go home, leaving Aryn to murder Malgus’s girlfriend on her own. She punches Eleena in the face and is about to kill her when she realizes that her character build can’t afford the influx of dark side points, so she stays her hand.
Meanwhile, Zeerid is busy stealing the ship that Vrath Xizor happens to be napping in while waiting for the blockade to end. They have a really brutal fistfight that involves a graphic description of Xizor blowing snot out of his nose for some reason, but Zeerid wins because he’s the hero and Xizor is an inconsequential secondary antagonist. As the ship leaves the planet’s atmosphere, Zeerid has resolved to drop Xizor off somewhere rather than killing him because he isn’t a cold-blooded murderer. For some reason, Xizor says, “Cool deal, bro, us ex-military types have to stick together. Spying on you so I could use your secret family for leverage was nothing personal, and don’t worry, I totally won’t tell my employers about them or anything,” so Zeerid flushes him out an airlock. It’s the hardest decision he’s ever made and will haunt him for the rest of his life and blah blah blah.
While this is going on, Darth Malgus, having realized that the two blockade runners are likely to try to escape Coruscant from the spaceport where Eleena is stationed, shows up to rescue her. Aryn holds the Twi’lek hostage and threatens to kill her unless Malgus orders the blockade to allow Zeerid’s ship to escape. Malgus does so, then thrashes Aryn in a lightsaber duel but allows her to live out of gratitude for having spared Eleena’s life. Once the Jedi has left, Malgus is like, “Eleena, I love you so much,” then stabs her through the heart, because he can’t afford to have any weaknesses or something.
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| I think Scandal recently did an episode with this same dumb plot. |
Later, after the Sith have withdrawn from Coruscant and the peace treaty between the Republic and the Empire has been signed, Malgus shows up at Darth Adraas’s house and murders him, while Zeerid buys robot legs for his daughter and takes her to live in hiding on a farm somewhere, where Aryn eventually tracks them down, telling the Z-Man that she’s left the Jedi Order to be with him. Happy endings all around.
This book is okay. Z-Man and Aryn are unremarkable and forgettable characters, but after multiple short videos and stories of build-up, Malgus finally comes to the fore as a legitimately interesting villain, which of course means that this is the last we’ll ever see from him unless we venture into the thousand-hour timesink of MMO Land. The religiosity of his devotion to the dark side and his inability to function within the Sith hierarchy despite his power and rank make him a unique character and one of the more compelling figures we’ll meet in this period of tie-in history.
I have to say, however, that this book makes a poor case for joining the Sith cause. If the prequels are anything to go by, the main recruitment benefit the Sith offer (don’t be swayed by their cool clothing options, as they usually come at the price of horrific physical disfigurement) is freedom to be yourself and indulge in your talents and desires without the overbearing restrictions of the Jedi Order. But the other Sith bully Malgus for having a girlfriend to the point that ultimately sacrifices the thing he loves most just so he can survive in their cutthroat society. Like, dude, what’s the point?
Otherwise, the writing is okay, the plot is bland but serviceable. It really doesn’t sound like Deceived has a lot to recommend it, but for a Star Wars book, you know, you could do a lot worse. 3.5/5 Death Stars.
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| Stabbed through the heart, and you’re to blame. |
Me: Did you get to the part in STEPHEN KING PRESENTS STEPHEN KING'S THE DARK TOWER VII: THE DARK TOWER yet where someone gives Roland a copy of Stephen King's INSOMNIA and says "Here this will help you on your quest" and Roland goes "I don't consider this canon" and throws it away?
Ben: I want to believe this is a jokey joke, but after the 9/11 thing I can no longer discount any possibility.
Today on Suicide by Star Wars Apocrypha, we’re looking at a pair of short stories about two female NPCs from Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare’s World of Warcraft clone that ruined the Old Republic era forever.
The first stars Hylo Visz, a sexy green-skinned smuggler chick delivering an illegal shipment of prototype ion drives to the Rendili Vehicle Corporation for her employer, Barrga the Hutt. Hylo is superstitious to the point of being mentally infirm, so when the hyperdrive generator on her crappy ship stops working during the delivery, she begins freaking out and tries to abandon the assignment. Barrga’s tagalong enforcers beat her up and take over her ship, completing the delivery and leaving her behind when they take off with their payment. But it turns out that they were paid in bombs, and Hylo-Vision Eye Drops’ ship explodes as soon as it’s in the air.
Hylo sneaks into the Rendili facility and disguises herself as a mechanic. She discovers that the facility is about to perform a test flight for a new model of starfighter designed specifically for the Jedi Order, the high-speed Vanguard corvette. She decides to steal the ship and use it to escape the planet, but her grand theft starship is interrupted when the worst Jedi Knight in the world enters the fighter. Hylo hits him in the face with her welding mask, immediately knocking him unconscious. She contemplates murdering him in cold blood, but decides this will probably bring her bad luck and elects to just throw him off the ship instead.
She takes off in the Vanguard and sets course for the Hutt moon of Nar Shaddaa, trying to think of a way to explain to her boss what happened, when she realizes that Barrga the Hutt probably thinks she’s dead and she can go anywhere she wants. So she does. The end.
This short story is pretty long for having so little happen in it. There are one or two somewhat suspenseful moments but mostly it’s boring and not very engagingly written. Also at one point the author wrote “bold-faced lies” instead of “bald-faces lies,” which makes this story terrible.
1.5/5 Death Stars.
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Hylo-Vision HD Plus Eye Drops provide immediate relief and refreshing for tired eyes and redness from dry air, contact lenses, allergies, chlorinated water from swimming pools, etc. |
Sith acolyte Lana Beniko and her friends, Bensyn and Kagan, have begun their final trial to prove themselves worthy of becoming full-fledged Sith: retrieving the helmet of Tulak Hord from the Valley of the Dark Lords on Korriban, homeworld of the Sith and most evil planet in the galaxy.
[Continuity Note: The story itself gives no indication of when it takes place. Wookieepedia places it between 3,644 and 3,640 BBY, but in “The Final Trial” Lana is still an apprentice and text in The Old Republic refers to her as already being a Sith Lord by 3,653 BBY.]
Kagan has been injured by some kind of slug monster, but together they press on, helping and relying on one another to succeed and generally not acting much like Sith at all. Suddenly they are attacked by a crazed former student who has been lost in the tomb for years. Lana has the opportunity to kill her, but pity stays her hand and she allows the dangerous crazy person to leave.
Eventually they find the helmet and are making their way back out of the tomb, Bensyn forced to carry Kagan as she grows ever weaker, when suddenly the insane student reappears and attacks them again, plunging a knife into Kagan’s chest. Lana quickly decapitates the lost acolyte but it’s too late to save their friend. Lana expects Bensyn to lash out at her in rage, but instead he continues carrying Kagan’s body out of the tomb, insisting that they all leave this place together.
Lana Beniko is a romanceable companion character in The Old Republic, and from what I understand she’s supposed to be a “good Sith” character, which seems like an oymoron but ooooh shades of gray or whatever. In this story, though, her un-Sith-like compassion comes back to bite her and gets her friend killed. Since it doesn’t really work as an origin story for why she’s a Sith Lord but not really evil, I’m not sure why it exists. Unless it’s, like, Bensyn not attacking her when she expected him to taught her that just because you’re a Sith you don’t always have to be a dick, or something. I don’t know, though; I didn’t get that vibe.
Not horribly written, I just don’t see the point of it. 2/5 Death Stars.
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| Well-behaved Sith Lords rarely make history. |
On the planet Alderaan, a platoon of Republic soldiers wearing what is clearly clone trooper armor that shouldn’t be invented for another 3,600 years faces off against an invading battalion of Sith warriors and what are clearly destroyer droids led by Darth Malgus. Jace Malcom, the trooper we previously saw in the Return trailer, shoots Malgus in the face with a BFG, slightly burning one side of his jaw, but he is quickly overwhelmed by the Sith Lord’s Force lightning. Things look bleak for the Republic soldiers when suddenly Satele Shan arrives and starts kicking everyone’s ass in bullet time. She and Malgus duel but Malgus is too powerful for her. He destroys her double-bladed lightsaber and is about to impale her but she’s able to use the Force to catch his lightsaber blade with her bare hands. While Malgus is distracted by how awesome this is, Jace Malcom tackles him and tries to take down a Lord of the Sith in a punching contest. Malgus is like “Dude wtf are you doing?” and Malcom detonates a grenade six inches in front of their faces.
Rather than killing either of them, all this does is blacken both their faces like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Malgus gets back to his feet but Satele Force-pushes him into the side of a cliff and collapses a mountain on top of him, so I guess he loses on a technicality. The Republic troopers shoot flares into the air all across the planet, signalling the Republic fleet arriving in orbit that they’ve somehow held off the invasion by beating one guy. Malcom solemnly intones in a voice-over that the courage they’ve shown here will ignite a spark of hope across the galaxy.
It’s hard to give a fair rating to these trailers because there’s virtually no story in any of them, they’re just showcases for sweet action scenes. But in that regard this was pretty awesome so 2.5/5 Death Stars for making everyone wish Lucasfilm had made an animated series out of this instead of the freaking Clone Wars again.
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| Ow my skin |
“The Third Lesson” picks up right where Hope left off, with the Sith forces in retreat from Alderaan as Republic reinforcements arrive. Darth Malgus has somehow unburied himself from the rubble Satele Shan dropped on him and is making a reluctant getaway aboard his personal shuttle. Enraged by having victory snatched from his jaws by a Republic trooper and a “Jedi witch,” and dealing with a respiratory infection brought on by a grenade detonating in his face to boot, Malgus is looking for someone to take out his frustration on. Through the Force, he senses a Jedi below him in one of Alderaan’s ravaged cities and hurls himself out of his shuttle to go murder it. As Malgus and the Jedi fight, Malgus thinks back to when he was a boy named Veradun and his father taught him three important lessons that help him win this battle.
1. “Senseless savagery is the province of animals, not men. Savagery is useful only if it’s controlled and put in service to an end. The end is everything.”
2. “Often things that pretend weakness await only the right moment to show strength.”
The third he learned the day he was accepted for training at the Dromund Kaas academy, when his father showed him a cage in their family zoo covered with a tarp, which Veradun removed to find nothing inside:
3. “Sometimes there’s just an empty cage.”
He puts this lesson to use when he allows the Jedi to think he’s going to spare him, then runs him through with his lightsaber while he’s still wondering why Malgus would show him mercy.
This story is very short and probably didn’t take the author much more than an hour to churn out, but if you’re reading the EU in chronological order like I am you might be shocked by how much better it is than the last prose we read. Look at this simile: “The burned-out buildings below stuck out of the scorched earth like rotted teeth, crooked and black.” That’s not the most sophisticated or original imagery I’ve ever read, but at least it’s something, which is so much more preferable than nothing.
The story is fine for what it is: our first glimpse into the mind of one of the TOR era’s most notable villains. Obviously it isn’t great literature, nor is it trying to be, but this small sample has increased my interest in the Paul Kemp books waiting for us down the timeline. 3/5 Death Stars.
